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Archive for category Media Criticism

The New York Times Is Worse Than Nixon

Jun 28

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Tom Maguire is all over the NYT’s latest “the public be damned” moment, and points the way to this funny satire by the New Editor entitled “NYT Announces Formation of Shadow Government”:

“Forgive me, I know this is pretty elementary stuff —  but it’s the kind of elementary context that sometimes gets lost on morons who don’t work for the New York Times, especially the knuckledraggers and mouth breathers who vote for Republicans,” said Keller. “And while we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, we just feel … well, that we’re smarter.””What he said,” said new shadow Secretary of Defense Paul Krugman.

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A Response to Mr. McClellan

Jun 28

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I think the only proper response to this Bill McClellan column, “Mr. President, you can woo blockheads for Talent” is, pardon my French, “Bill, you can kiss my ass.”

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Why I Hate The Press: Reason 1

Jun 23

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Yesterday I’m reading a USA today editorial about how we need a press shield law to protect America. Not just no, but hell no. Can we get a special prosecutor, someone who’s able to keep his eye on the ball, unlike Fitzgerald, to start prosecuting the leakers who are trying to help our enemies? And I mean yesterday. Because it’s getting to the point that if Bill Keller were to show up on the inside of cage in Guantanamo I’m not sure I’d complain, let alone be troubled by that — and that just isn’t right.

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Media Bias: A Description

Jun 16

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The best description I’ve read of bias in the entertainment media and what it means from Andrew Klavan at Libertas:

All the same, it’s a relief to see it. I mean, personally, I would prefer my romantic comedy to come without partisan politics at all, but I suspect that’s almost impossible nowadays. One side has so much control over the narrative assumptions that underlie most movies that merely to work under a different set of assumptions is to declare an opposing position. I mean, in movies, the big corporation is always bad, the environmentalist always good; the gun-lover is always crazy, the religious guy always repressed or insane. The patriot is always a jingoist, wise men are always black, gays are always friends and advisors and, if you watch carefully, a poor man’s crimes are almost always traceable back to a rich man’s perfidy. The suburbs are always either comic or stifling, abortion may be rejected but never for moral reasons and — my personal favorite — the United Nations is always a force for truth and justice instead of the loathsomely corrupt gang of child-molesting, sex-trading kleptocratic tyrants we know and abhor.In short, at the movies, as on the network news, one worldview is assumed to be the steady state of affairs, while any other is considered a more or less ugly aberration. As a result, even the slightest indication that the hero of a movie might be, say, a Charlton Heston fan is bracing, a noticeable statement nearly shocking in its aggression. As for patriotism, faith, energetic capitalism — what some of us call normal on a good day — these become ferocious political pronouncements measured against a radical baseline.

Amen, brother Andrew. OK, I teased you, because to learn what it means you have to go visit and read the end. I will add a filip of my own – it’s worse than described because the entertainment media and the news media provide a seemless web of reinforcing bias since they have the same ones.

No Bias Here

May 26

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The official figure of economic growth was revised upwards to 5.3% for last quarter – a blistering pace. And where was this tidbit of information – why, on page 3 of the business section in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Any guess about where it would have been if a Democrat was President? Mine is above the fold front page.

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Dana Milbank Sucks

May 25

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Yes, my title is an ad hominem. But I claim truth as a defense. The sad thing, Dana is just another in a sea of terrible reporters who can’t tell where their opinion leaves off and reality begins.

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The Real Story of Katrina

May 23

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Not only is most of what you know about Katrina not true, but you’ve never heard the real story of Katrina: the National Guard (with lots of help from the Coast Guard, and the Lousiana Fish and Wildlife Department), supposedly overstretched and worn out from Iraq, saved tens of thousands of lives in New Orleans. Why? Quiet competence never gets media attention:

The procedure ran under a system known as EMACs (Emergency Management Assistance Compacts), a mutual aid pact among states. The conference call became a daily routine that was New Orleans’ primary lifeline to outside aid. It bypassed local officials and the fouled-up federal chain of command that led to much publicized infighting among the Governor, FEMA and the White House. According to the Senate Select Committee on Katrina, “This process quickly resulted in the largest National Guard deployment in U.S. history, with 50,000 troops and supporting equipment arriving from 49 states and four territories within two weeks. These forces participated in every aspect of emergency response, from medical care to law enforcement and debris removal…” the report said. All from the Superdome.

Meanwhile, late Monday, Louisiana National Guard HQ moved its high tech “unified command suite” and tents to the upper parking deck of the Superdome. This degraded communications for about four hours but ultimately gave them satellite dishes for phone and Internet connections to the outside world, Wi-fi, plus radios that were the only talk of the town. Helicopters and boats, as we noted, were already bringing in survivors there. About fifty men and women, black and white, worked per shift, equipped with maps, laptops, phone and radios to coordinate the rescue operation. The rescuers called it the “eagles’ nest”.

The operation was impossible to hide or ignore and some news outlets may have mentioned it in passing. Still, I haven’t seen anything reported that sounded like what the two Majors described Tuesday morning: helicopters landing every minute; big ones, like the National Guard Chinooks, literally shaking the decking of the rooftop parking lot; little ones like the ubiquitous Coast Guard Dolphins; Black Hawks everywhere, many with their regular seats torn out so they could accommodate more passengers, standing. Private air ambulance services evacuating patients from flood-threatened hospitals. Owners of private helicopters who showed up to volunteer, and were sent on their way with impromptu briefings on basic rescue needs. Overhead, helicopters stacked in a holding pattern.
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In all this time, Dressler said, “We didn’t see a single camera crew or reporter on the scene. Maybe someone was there with a cell phone or a digital camera but I didn’t see anyone.” This was in the headquarters area. Maj. Ed Bush, meanwhile, did start seeing reporters on Tuesday and Wednesday, but inside the Dome, most were interested in confirming the stacks of bodies in the freezers, interviews with rape victims, he said, and other mayhem that never happened. He pitched the rescue angle and no one was interested. A few reporters and film crews did hitch rides on helicopters, came back, and produced stories of people stuck on rooftops, not stories about rescues, he said.

Neither Maj. Bush nor Dressler saw TV until the end of the week. They were aghast. Apart from sporadic mentions, the most significant note taken of this gigantic operation was widespread reporting of the rumor that a sniper had fired on a helicopter. What were termed evacuations in some cases, rescue operations in others, were said to have been halted as a result. “I never knew how badly we were being killed in the media,” Maj. Ed Bush says. In reality, the only shots fired at the Guard were purely metaphorical and originated with the media. Rescues continued 24/7 at a furious pace.

I’m reminded time and time again just how badly the press, which always holds others up to such high standards, does in getting stories right.

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A Letter To The Editor

May 12

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I do so enjoy a good letter to the editor. And today the Post served up a good one:

Paradoxical Post In light of the May 4 editorial opposing use of the term “Christmas holidays break” by the Francis Howell School District, the May 5 edition is a fascinating example of paradoxes.

On May 4, the Post-Dispatch told us the issue is of no practical impact at all, but on May 5, the story was on Page 1, above the fold. On May 4, the Post-Dispatch decried the emotional content of the issue, but on May 5 published a letter from a lady who does not live in the Francis Howell district but who most emphatically does not want Christmas shoved down her throat. (I suppose she avoids all shopping malls from October on each year.) On May 4, the Post-Dispatch told us Americans are free to call the holiday whatever we want, but on May 5 repeated warnings the district may face lawsuits.

On May 4, the Post-Dispatch warned us of how emotions can be whipped up, and on May 5 demonstrated its willingness to be one of the whips.

Roger W. Collins

Roger, Roger, Roger, you need to remember a foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of small minds.

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Blogs Vs. MSM

May 9

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I wrote this in response to the Don Surber post The Truth About Newspaper Circulation

Don,

Why does blog vs. MSM have to be binary either or? They both have strengths and weaknesses. Do I have to read only one and not the other?

Why make a comparison between the hits the top 770 newspapers get and those one top blogger gets? Shouldn’t you be comparing either the hits of the top newspaper to the top blogger or the top 770 newspapers with the top 770 bloggers? If 770 newspapers get more than 365 time the hits one blogger gets, does that mean the top blogger gets more than twice the hits of the average top 770 newspapers? Wouldn’t that be an amazing statistic?

Don, what’s with “blogs have no credibility”? With whom? You? Do you have any data (the plural of anecdote isn’t data) to base this on? Frankly, there are blogs that have no credibility with me, and there are those who have a great deal of credibility. There are a few MSM outlets left that have a great deal of credibility with me, but most have little to none. Can I generalize from my opinion to what the general public thinks? Not without data. For what it’s worth, my memory of the last survey I saw on this subject said that only 19% of people surveyed thought that newspapers were usually reliable.

There are some blogs out there doing far better analysis than most of what I read in the newspapers. Not opinion in the sense that most opinion pieces are written: I present only the facts that support my position, but a real exploration of what’s going on and an honest attempt to make sense of all the messiness of the real world.

There are blogs out there doing original reporting – who’s provided better basic eyewitness reporting in Iraq than Michael Yon (or Michael Totten in the middle east)? We get better basic eyewitness reporting of protest demonstrations in blogs all the time. Blogs finally got Dan Rather off the air, and Captain Ed brought down a government. The sad truth is that at the moment the best blogs are bringing clarity and the best newspapers are bringing FUD (and the worst bloggers are far worse than the worst papers).

For me, there are certain structural problems with the MSM (what is news, the news cycle, that sort of thing), but they pale in significance to what I would consider the real problems of the MSM today: bias, arrogance, poor judgement, and quite frankly just lousy quality. These are quite fixable problems if the MSM can just realize what the problems are – and I fully expect with the MSM moving to the net the outfits that correct them will thrive and those that don’t will disappear.

I want a reliable press who can report the facts, provide the context,and help me understand what’s happening in the world. I’m not getting that today, and I’m unhappy about it.

Eggers Resigns At The Post-Dispatch

May 5

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Terrance Eggers, the publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is leaving the newspaper effective May 19th. Last November, Ellen Soeteber resigned as Editor-in-Chief. It seems that Mr. Eggers is leaving for the same reasons Ms. Soeteber left – the Post has money problems, or as they described it, the paper faces a “choppy advertising market that prevented Egger from meeting modest revenue targets during his last year of a decade-long run in St. Louis.”

I have to feel sorry for newspaper people these days – its the best of times as the internet beckons, and it is the worst of times, as the current advertising base dries up. Here we are in a robust expansion, and the ad revenue isn’t coming back — which means it isn’t going to come back. I think this accounts for the generally unhappy outlook on the economy by the press — their economy isn’t good, so they assume nobody else’s is, either.

Bill McClellan wrote about Mr. Egger’s departure. Bill get’s his facts right but his interpretation is way off: “An odd but endearing quality of newspaper folk is that we profess to know a lot about everybody else’s business but know almost nothing of our own.” It isn’t odd but endearing – it’s thoroughly annoying. And then he notes the big bucks Mr. Eggers has been paid ($3 million when Pulitzer was bought out, $675,000 retention bonus, and $1 million severance package) — all the while his editorial page has been blasting other execs for similar excess. The press can’t stand the same scrutiny and standards they hold everyone else to.

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